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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that’s exactly his point. Brown is dark orange, and you can’t make a light that’s the dark version of any colour, you can just have less of that colour. We only think of brown as a colour because we decided to give dark orange a name.

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I guess I'm just confused as to why this video needed making. I didn't think the brown/dark orange equivalence was surprising, or a revelation. In the same way that I'd be confused if someone made a video saying, "Guys! Guess what! Pink is just light red!"

Well, among other things, English had a word for "brown" long before it had a word for "orange," which as the video described was previously seen just as a shade of red or yellow. Brown is just a more prominent color in nature.

Well pink actually is not just light red but mixed with blue, as mentioned in the OP video as well, a mix of two ends of the visible spectrum.

> a mix of two ends of the visible spectrum

Wasn't that about magenta/fuchsia? ( #FF00FF )

The important insight was that dark orange/brown only exists in a context. There has to be something lighter visible for it to be perceived as dark. Whereas pink is a different mix of light than red. You can't make a red light bulb pink no matter how bright you make it. And you can't make an orange light bulb brown without putting a different brighter light alongside it.

You can make a pink light though, but not a brown one.

For one, because you can make pink by mixing light, but you cannnot make brown by mixing light. The fact that brown only exists when you get dark orange but situation in an otherwise light surrounding means that if your color rendering is based on mixing light, brown is literally impossible to make on its own. You cannot, inherently, get any light system to make brown on its own. It either has to frame it with a much lighter color in the screen, or it needs to be situated in a much lighter surrounding.

That's why this video is good educational material: it covers the contextual aspect of color that a lot of folks will have never even thought of. After all, pink is just red that you added white to, why not just add black to orange to get brown ("because that works for paint, but is literally impossible when your medium is light").

Maroon is dark red/purple. Indigo is dark blue/purple. Olive is dark green.

Yet I bet brown has dramatically more hits in the English corpus than maroon, indigo or olive (colour).

fur-poo-bark color was probably more useful to name.

Q: What's brown and sticky?

A: A stick!

Yes, but if you're trying to rebut me then you're mixing up the causality. "Brown" has more hits because people think about it differently (e.g., it's very frequently in their environment). The existence/prevalence of the name "brown" didn't cause people to think about it differently.

Yes, and you also can’t get an olive-coloured light, which is the whole point of the video.

My point was that we gave names to these other colors, so that doesn't seem to be the reason people think brown is a "real" color more than maroon and olive.

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